The Daniel Singer Foundation designates Boris Kagarlitsky as recipient of its 2024 Prisoner of Conscience Award

The award includes $10,000.

BORIS KAGARLITSKY IS A RUSSIAN JOURNALIST, ACTIVIST AND SOCIOLOGIST who is now serving five years in a Russian penal colony. As a socialist, Kagarlitsky fought for a democratic and socialist society in both the former Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation. As a result, he has an arrest record that spans the Brezhnev and Putin eras.

In the 1970s, the young Kagarlitsky was expelled from the State Institute of Theatrical Art as a dissident. In 1982, while editor of the samizdat journal Leviy Povorot (Left Turn), he was arrested for “anti-Soviet activities.” He was released in 1983. 

During the Gorbachev “opening,” Kagarlitsky emerged as a leader of the Socialist left and was elected to the Moscow City Soviet—the city’s governing body.

As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Kagarlitsky strove mightily to bring together individuals and groups that could help create an egalitarian democratic society. During the constitutional crisis of 1993, he was arrested for opposing Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of the country’s elected Parliament. Kagarlitsky credits protests from abroad for his release the next day. He described the fateful transition period in his book Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed.

Though bitterly aware of the lost chance for democracy, Kagarlitsky persisted. In 2021, he was held for ten days for insisting that the election results were fraudulent. In 2022, he was declared a foreign agent but stayed in the country and continued to write and broadcast on his popular Rabkor YouTube channel. 

In 2023 Boris Kagarlitsky was arrested for “justifying terrorism.” The charge was based on a joke on a social-media video about a cat on the bridge to Crimea. For this act of humor, he spent nearly five months in pretrial detention a thousand kilometers north of Moscow. The prosecution at Kagarlitsky’s trial in December demanded a sentence of five to seven years, but he was instead released with a 600,000-ruble fine. In February 2024, the prosecutor appealed the earlier decision as too lenient and though he had already been released, Boris Kagarlitsky was taken directly from a judicial hearing to serve five years in a penal colony. That’s where he is today.

As of January 2024, about 20,000 Russians had been arrested for opposing the invasion of Ukraine. The government is now arresting people it had photographed earlier for laying flowers at Navalny’s memorial. These arrests, occurring visibly throughout the Russian Federation, plus the dramatic resentencing of a well-known critic, can be seen as Vladimir Putin’s declaration that dissent, however peaceful or witty, will no longer be tolerated. 

As a respected sociologist, widely published author and popular lecturer in both Europe and the United States, Boris Kagarlitsky could have had a position at a Western university at almost any point in his career. But he chose to remain in Russia to fight first against a grotesque parody of communism and then against a particularly cruel form of capitalism.

In his writing, in his political organizing and in his life, Boris Kagarlitsky displays a casual courage and easy wit that incenses authoritarians. This same grace and courage inspire others to fight on.

So it is with both sorrow and hope that the Daniel Singer Foundation bestows its Prisoner of Conscience Award on Boris Kagarlitsky.